Life, Precarious, But Tenacious! And Glorious!

We are facing, today, the world’s worst pandemic for a century, with millions of people dead, and more millions yet fated to die. What is our nemesis? A virus, a substance our wise men tell us, is not alive. I cannot get my head around the concept that something which has a drive to replicate itself, which needs living tissue to accomplish this, can be classed as non-living. And it even mutates! Nonetheless it is depriving living creatures, like humans, of life. And often, it seems to do this by turning our own defenses against it, as a means to deprive us of our capacity to survive. It seems more effective in this task precisely among those of us who have most successfully resisted the ravages of time, the elderly.

This idea of being old is becoming more and more controversial. There are now those among us that are resisting the idea that aging is solely a natural phenomenon, maintaining that it is more like a disease. On top of that we have seen experiments which have claimed that age can be rolled back in a very substantial way. Persons that have been subjected to long periods in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber have had the telomeres in their DNA grown by twenty per cent. The theory is that our telomeres shorten with age, and as they do, we eventually die. Growing them, it is thought, is then a way of extending life. Why not?

What has been most remarkable, indeed, in our latest episode of threats to life on our planet, is the creativity of humans in finding ways to counter the threats to human existence on this planet. We know that developing vaccines to meet the dangers to life posed by disease have taken decades in the past. This time, the human family around the world has rallied to the cause and found solutions in a matter of months. It will likely take longer to roll out the answer to billions of the globe’s inhabitants than it has taken to arrive at solutions.

This is just a small example of how the living things in nature tenaciously cling to life, finding ways to survive in one way or another to the threats to their existence.